Raging for the Machine

by Cauf Skiviers, Cultural Inappropriation, ©2023

(Dec. 2, 2023) —

“Life is full of infinite absurdities, which, strangely enough, do not even need to appear plausible, since they are true.”
Luigi Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author

I hate Literature.

Mostly because I like good stories. And Literature tries its best to spoil them. This whole idea of Literature as its own distinct field didn’t always exist. It’s one of those fancy ideas that came out of the Enlightenment, but we assume had always existed — like industrial-scale slavery and eugenics.

As a formal academic discipline, Literature came about in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Before that, the study of literature was part of a broader Classical Education. It was about grammar, rhetoric, and composition. Perfection.

1862 saw the invention of pasteurisation. Ten years later, Harvard’s got its English department up and running. Coincidence? I don’t think so. The glory of hard sciences was the tragedy of humanities — a shift from universal values to self-referential relativism, now a mark of modern universities. So when Bob Dylan wins a Nobel Prize or Harvard teaches Taylor Swift, it shouldn’t cause shock and revolt. It’s Literature doing what it is.

The real tragedy goes beyond the damage to education. It’s the culture that’s sprung from it, fixated not just primarily, but almost exclusively, on form. Underpinned by the faith that a piece of writing is its own world, and always justified. It need not engage with reality. Literature should only talk to itself, they assume.

Then structuralism swallowed entire libraries. The story has been neglected for aesthetic trick shots: playing hide and seek with the narrator, overusing metalanguage. If you’re not writing the next Ulysses, then your work is out of touch. You must either neglect punctuation or use it as a stylistic device — something maybe fresh when Joyce did it, but now it’s just lazy, unoriginal.

And I’m not precious about punctuation. Just give me a decent amount. It’s punctuation that sets us apart, from the animals. Even when it shouldn’t.

Art as a bridge between reader and reality, whether true or imagined? Most modern writers either turn their backs on it or shove it in the backseat.

Literature now is like a tax, a layer of needless pomp you gotta wade through just to see if there’s a good story hiding somewhere. It needs to go. But don’t label me a reactionary for saying so. That’s Borges’ critique, one of the greatest storytellers. And Harold Bloom saw the decline as it happened, calling out the way literature studies were heading in the 1960s, with the increasing politicisation in the academic world.

But modern writers are up against the ropes, and not just for that, but also due to technology. Once, to hear a story, we needed the author to tell it to us. Later, we could read about it — as edited by someone else. Next, we could just watch it — produced by yet another party. Now, with generative AI, the machine is testing the limits of this progressive intellectual Dadaism.

Degenerative AI

“Statistics are like bikinis. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital.”
Aaron Levenstein

Earlier this year — like most normal people —, I was in disarray. Drinking myself to sleep, wrestling with the nightmarish implications of the screenwriter’s strike, “who’s gonna poop on our statues,” I mumbled into my glass, “now that the pigeons are gone?”

This strike has laid bare the literary clique’s issue with AI: it’s about the democratisation of the means of creative production. Those ‘intellectuals’ who look down on manual labour can’t stomach the idea of AI bringing the vulgar masses into their sacred territory. They see the shift in the dynamics of content creation and interaction as a direct threat to their cozy, modernist enterprise.

Their fear is twofold. Firstly, obsolescence. Current AI models, endlessly inbreeding ideas in an echo chamber, mirror the screenwriters’ process of today to perfection. Their work has become commodified. They’re all out of fresh ideas, and new blood can now only come from outside their circles. They know the times are changing.

Second, it’s about power. They want to put a leash on our freedom of expression and interpretation. With the likes of ChatGPT, we could get Jon Fosse with commas in the right places, Michel Houellebecq without the cussing, and Maya Angelou minus the feminist preaching. Even if all it returns is a blank page.

ChatGPT? No, it’s not even in the same league as Fosse, Houellebecq, or Angelou. But it can hack it as a screenwriter, at least by today’s standards. It can churn out literature, but not stories. It’s statistics after all. Worse yet, it is a brute force resurrection of econometrics (b. 1926 — d. 2008).

Yet, it’s near good enough for us to get Disney minus the wokeness, and CNN minus the bias. We can even mix and match. Imagine Bukowski covering sports, Kafka doing politics. It’s like swinging the doors wide open to the dreaded freedom of interpretation.

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